In 1985, a Swiss pathologist noted Alzheimer’s disease-like changes—plaques and tangles—in the brains of about three-quarters of a small group of men and women in their 50s and 60s who had died from other causes, whereas most brains collected under age 30 were clean. But these studies just involved a few dozen people.

Based on thousands of autopsies, one can see what appears to be the first silent stages starting even in our 20s, in about 10% of the population, and about 50% by age 50. Just as the first malignant cells in cancer fail to produce any clinically detectable symptoms, but represent a larger and potentially life-threatening disease process, the presence of these tangles in the brain may constitute a true threat.

The high prevalence of the first stage of the disease, even in the young, and its extraordinarily long duration—most people don’t get diagnosed with Alzheimer’s until their 70s—had not been fully appreciated until now. We now understand that neurodegenerative brain changes begin by middle age. And, so does cognitive decline. We start losing brain function in our 40s.

Before people are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, they’re diagnosed with what’s called MCI, mild cognitive impairment. That’s when cognitive decline becomes clinically apparent. A few years later, Alzheimer’s may be diagnosed, which then results in death. But we never knew what was happening before mild cognitive impairment was diagnosed—until now. There appears to be a slow decline in brain function and the buildup of plaques and tangles in the brain, for decades before Alzheimer’s is diagnosed.

This finding potentially has profound implications for the prevention of dementia: we have to start early, before marked brain loss has occurred.

The good news is that brain disease is not inevitable, even after age 100. The oldest woman in the world retained the brainpower of those practically half her age. Had she not died from stomach cancer, she could have kept on thriving.

It turns out there’s no such thing as dying from old age. 42,000 consecutive autopsies were studied, and centenarians (those living past 100), though most were perceived to have been healthy just prior to death—even by their physicians—succumbed to diseases in 100% of the cases examined. Not one died of “old age.” Until recently, advanced age was considered to be a disease itself, but people don’t die as a consequence of old age, as commonly assumed, but from diseases—most commonly, heart attacks.

But, not in our 115-year-old. One of the most intriguing findings was that her body showed no significant atherosclerosis, and the arteries in her brain were clear as well. And that may have actually been one of the secrets to her mental clarity. There is emerging consensus that “what is good for our hearts is also good for our heads,” which I’ll cover next.

To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by Katie Schloer.

In 1985, a Swiss pathologist noted Alzheimer’s disease-like changes—plaques and tangles—in the brains of about three-quarters of a small group of men and women in their 50s and 60s who had died from other causes, whereas most brains collected under age 30 were clean. But these studies just involved a few dozen people.

Based on thousands of autopsies, one can see what appears to be the first silent stages starting even in our 20s, in about 10% of the population, and about 50% by age 50. Just as the first malignant cells in cancer fail to produce any clinically detectable symptoms, but represent a larger and potentially life-threatening disease process, the presence of these tangles in the brain may constitute a true threat.

The high prevalence of the first stage of the disease, even in the young, and its extraordinarily long duration—most people don’t get diagnosed with Alzheimer’s until their 70s—had not been fully appreciated until now. We now understand that neurodegenerative brain changes begin by middle age. And, so does cognitive decline. We start losing brain function in our 40s.

Before people are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, they’re diagnosed with what’s called MCI, mild cognitive impairment. That’s when cognitive decline becomes clinically apparent. A few years later, Alzheimer’s may be diagnosed, which then results in death. But we never knew what was happening before mild cognitive impairment was diagnosed—until now. There appears to be a slow decline in brain function and the buildup of plaques and tangles in the brain, for decades before Alzheimer’s is diagnosed.

This finding potentially has profound implications for the prevention of dementia: we have to start early, before marked brain loss has occurred.

The good news is that brain disease is not inevitable, even after age 100. The oldest woman in the world retained the brainpower of those practically half her age. Had she not died from stomach cancer, she could have kept on thriving.

It turns out there’s no such thing as dying from old age. 42,000 consecutive autopsies were studied, and centenarians (those living past 100), though most were perceived to have been healthy just prior to death—even by their physicians—succumbed to diseases in 100% of the cases examined. Not one died of “old age.” Until recently, advanced age was considered to be a disease itself, but people don’t die as a consequence of old age, as commonly assumed, but from diseases—most commonly, heart attacks.

But, not in our 115-year-old. One of the most intriguing findings was that her body showed no significant atherosclerosis, and the arteries in her brain were clear as well. And that may have actually been one of the secrets to her mental clarity. There is emerging consensus that “what is good for our hearts is also good for our heads,” which I’ll cover next.

To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by Katie Schloer.

78 responses to “Alzheimer’s May Start Decades Before Diagnosis”

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I would think that one would want to avoid neurological damage in the first place by eating WFPB’d. That being said, I wouldn’t doubt it because the body has amazing powers of regenerative self healing processes in place.

“Numerous epidemiologic studies
have indicated that individuals who consume diets
containing large amounts of fruits and vegetables may reduce their risk
for developing age-related diseases such as
Alzheimer disease.” http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/81/1/313S.short

I’m thinking of starting a vitamin C detox regime (as per the perque.org program) to hopefully rid myself of all the poisons I’ve accumulated over the years. I dread to think how much mercury I’ve accumulated with all my amalgum fillings alone.

Has anyone ever tried the vitamin C approach, any recommendations or advice to the contrary would be appreciated.

I think that if you are interested in detoxification that focuses on Vitamin C, you might consider getting the C from a plant-based, whole food such as broccoli rather than from a supplement. One cup of broccoli gives you about 135%%DV of Vitamin C, it tastes great and you get the health benefits of sulfuraphane. The regime you mention is just trying to sell you some supplements. Here is a video from Dr Greger on the best detox.

The study he sites is one a few “who’s who” of bad research sponsored by the federal government to bad name vitamins. The daily recommended dose of Vitamin C is just to prevent scurvy, not for maximum health. Humans are alone in the animal world in not making vitamin C. At least one other study has found just the opposite. “Those with the higher levels of serum (bloodstream) vitamin C lived longer. With only 300 mg a day, heart disease was reduced by 50 percent in men and about 40 percent in women. Those with higher levels of vitamin C in their blood lived six years longer than their counterparts.” http://www.naturalnews.com/026919_vitamin_C_blood_life.html#ixzz3mpObmlV1

The study he sites is one a few “who’s who” of bad research sponsored by the federal government to bad name vitamins.

And you are doing what, citing an unscholarly article from Natural News that is bereft of focused citations for its claims? If you honestly do have a higher standard for the quality of research, then why not just show higher quality research directly?

Oh good Lord, saying taking high dose Vitamin C can shorten your life is like saying heart disease is not scurvy. Humans cannot make Vitamin C. We make Lipoprotein(a) instead. This protein, a cholesterol, fills in damaged arteries, waiting for you to get some Vitamin C to make the actual repairs. A goat weighing as much as man makes 16 grams of Vitamin C a day. Humans have to deal with damaged arteries without Vitamin C. Is it true that to be a member of this site the only vitamins you can take are B12 and D3? I see it as very easy to get gingivitis and other warning signs of scurvy on only a few broccoli pieces a day. How would you even assess longevity in a ten year study of 50 year old doctors? PubMed is a blank resource for information on how vitamins affect longevity because the federal government does not fund, publish, or endorse this kind of research. If you got diagnosed with heart disease, you might just barely be relieved to hear of it as a scurvy, a vitamin C deficiency, and lysine deficiency. Thank you for reading my Natural News article. If you click on it, they link to a PubMed research paper that says the following: “The relation of the standardized mortality ratio (SMR) for all causes of death to increasing vitamin C intake is strongly inverse for males and weakly inverse for females.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1591317?dopt=Abstract Vitamin C is extremely important for longevity. Thank you.

Oh good Lord, saying taking high dose Vitamin C can shorten your life is like saying heart disease is not scurvy.

It depends on the dose we’re talking about, and you haven’t demonstrated that heart disease is scurvy.

We make Lipoprotein(a) instead. This protein, a cholesterol, fills in damaged arteries, waiting for you to get some Vitamin C to make the actual repairs.

This is a huge claim. What peer-reviewed research do you have in support of it? Have you addressed any contrary observations?

The thing is that you recapitulate the problem of the Natural News article. You make a bunch of huge claims and do some narrative handwaving about how any non-evidence for your position is because of Government, rather than showing me focused citations in support of your claims. I don’t even really need long-term observations to start taking you seriously; just show me something analogous to Essylstyn’s relatively short-term case series in the case of Pauling therapy, for example. Show me the data on plaque regression in the carotid artery.

Goats are not a particularly good basis for inferring vitamin C requirements in humans by themselves. We aren’t metabolically similar to goats in other ways, and have been developing without the capacity to produce vitamin C for roughly 60 million years. Gorillas in the wild are estimated to get only 4g/d of oral vitamin C in spite of their much larger bodies and bulky diets. The range of 88 to 106mg/kg/d in select monkeys would suggest appropriate ascorbate intake of about 6-7g/d in a 150 lb human. It seems plausible that intake has been steadily declining over long periods of evolutionary time and it is reasonable to suppose that some adaptations have taken over if the actual requirement in ancestral primates that produced ascorbate was actually high early on.

But all this is not so important compared with clinical data. Note that I don’t really deny that up to about 1g/d vitamin C may be helpful in individuals with high risk of a cardiovascular event eating a poor diet. Beyond that I’m less certain, but there has been some evidence in this area and vitamin C’s antioxidant role is plausibly important for stabilizing plaque. What I dispute is the privileged place that you are giving to vitamin C in the etiology of heart disease, your claims that Lipo(a)’s function is reparative and not atherogenic, and the simplistic idea that gingivitis on a diet with a few stalks of broccoli suggests scurvy. It’s quite natural to expect that gingivitis would be quite cosmopolitan in plant based diets with a high carbohydrate content,

Thank you for saying monkeys make about 4-6 grams of Vitamin C a day. I didn’t know that. Many studies stating the benefit of Vitamin C go unpublished. For an illustrative example, I would point you to “A (Patented) Heart Disease Cure That Works!” by David Leake. The Pauling Therapy has at least some reported success. Linus Pauling made the observation about Lipoprotein(a). Many people allege that big pharma controls the medical literature. I am not sure that they don’t and don’t want legitimate research on vitamins published. There has been less than one death from vitamins reported a year. The RDAs are just to prevent the obvious disease from deficiency. The federal government knows some vitamins are very good for you, iodine, niacin, B12, and D3 and forces you to take them in bread, salt, and milk. There really is only an upper limit of how much you can stand to take with some vitamins. I think that is a conflict of interests. Vitamin A, C, Iron, and Calcium are listed by law on every nutrient facts label. This is nutrition facts.org, right? I sure think someone is trying to get us to take more of those because fortification is inappropriate. I am thrilled that you think one gram of Vitamin C might be appropriate. I don’t really have any information besides the fact that some people take Vitamin C to just before bowel tolerance, diarrhea, 40 grams or more. There is no study to see if they live longer. What do they know? Why is this appealing to me? Linus Pauling took 16 grams a day. He lived to 93. How much vitamin C should I take? Linus Pauling said at least three grams. Maybe it’s just non-heme Iron that is a real cancer fighter. The actual atom that adsorbs Oxygen.

The citation that 300 mg of Vitamin C can add 6 years to a man’s life and reduce male mortality by 41 percent is at:
Enstrom JE, Kanim LE & Klein MA: Vitamin C Intake and Mortality among a Sample of the United States Population. Epidemiology 3:194-202, 1992.
The difference among women is not as strong. Further study seems redundant to scholars, sadly. Why isn’t as strong among women?

Yes, I just did. It is available online in its entirety at http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.467.3490&rep=rep1&type=pdf This study says that the consumption of Vitamin C supplements, even more so then vitamin C containing foods, can dramatically reduce the risk of death or improve longevity and that these results are consistent with many other studies. Thank you for saying supplementing with one gram of Vitamin C may be appropriate. Linus Pauling said supplementing with three grams of Vitamin C may add 25 years to your life. This study, in a discussion of it I read, said supplementing with 300 mg can add 6 years to a man’s life and dramatically reduce the risk of many cancers. It would be almost impossible to get 300 mg of Vitamin C from diet everyday. Do you entirely support Dr. Greger in saying many supplements are not helpful? I do not think, with the case of Niacin and Vitamin C in particular, that that is true. Many nutritionists see vitamins as a conflict of interests. Many doctors disdain vitamins. However, eating vegan is unlikely a reality in this country, whereas, the effect can be mimicked with certain vitamins. The study clearly says that there is an inverse correlation between death and vitamin C consumption, maybe even a dose dependent inverse correlation. I do not think the Physicians’ Health study can over through this correlation, even if it was designed, in part, to get people to talk less vitamins so doctors could have more work. Ask around. Dr. Greger did a video on Vitamin E too, in which it quoted a poorly designed study which used synthetic vitamin E. The Harvard study that said too much Vitamin E can cause pancreatic cancer was recanted by them in its entirety. They published a multi page retraction saying Vitamin E can prevent pancreatic cancer and were truly sorry that they got so many people to stop taking Vitamin E. Almost within a day of that study the number of heart surgeries went up. Doctors did know, somewhere down the line, that vitamins are very bad for business. Vitamin D, C, and E in particular. When people were on high doses of Vitamin E heart surgeons lost so much work.

The statistically significant results you are citing are based on comparisons between the study group supplementing with 50+mg/d and a standardized point estimate for US Whites, unadjusted for confounders (table 3), and the trends in table 7 which are rather bizarrely drawn across a highly qualitative, constructed variable (vitamin C index) where the regression slope is highly influenced by people getting less than the current RDA of vitamin C. Is this correct?

Secondly, I don’t understand why you think this paper has not been followed up on by other researchers. It’s cited 37 times in PubMed and, for instance, the most recent citation is a similar cohort study on vitamin C supplementation and mortality (with some strengths and some weaknesses in the data relative to this one), which reports a null result: http://www.ncbi-nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25550360

You’ve generated a lot more claims in this reply, too, but I would like to see citations before I believe any of them.

Definitely more research is required as underweight is no guarantee of health. Your nutrition can be as bad as a overweight person if you are not eating the right stuff. And considering that a large amount of humans are not eating things good for them, not all of them are going to be overweight.

Losing weight in middle and old age is often not the result of trying to eat more healthily. It can often be a sign of underlying disease. AD in particular is associated with continued weight loss once it is diagnosed, so I’m not exactly surprised that pre-diagnosis AD would be causing the same sort of weight loss and could be used as a signal in some models. The causal structure is still up for debate but because weight loss is observed in AD patients themselves, there is some money in the bank for the idea that it’s a matter of subclinical AD rearing its head, which would be in accord with the theme of this video.

See http://directorsblog.nih.gov/2014/04/29/secrets-of-a-supercentenarians-genome/ She had raw salted herring and orange juice every day. A Wikipedia article on her states that she also occasionally indulged in advocaat, a dutch liquor which contains eggs, sugar, brandy and often, cream. Her mother lived to be 100, so it seems that genes or luck rather than diet was the cause of her long life. Imagine how much longer she could have lived on a WFPB diet.

How so? Clearly I’m assuming that a WFPB diet is the healthiest, and am not unjustified from the thousands of articles Dr. Greger has published on the subject. She had good genes in her family, from her mother and luck always plays a role; the bad luck of a random mutation can kill you by causing cancer. I don’t want to be illogical, so please tell me where my thinking is going astray.

Thanks for the info! Re: logic – maybe just needed to add the word “primary” in front of cause? As Dr. Esselstyn says: “Genetics loads the gun, and lifestyle pulls the trigger”. Interestingly, the woman died of stomach cancer: one cause of which is “a diet high in smoked, pickled, and salted foods”! Her herring may have well been a double-edged sword: helped her brain with the omega-3 fatty acids (/nucleic acids as Fred mentions below), but harmed her stomach? Dr. Weil advocates eating herring, but I won’t eat the poor little fishies even if I go bonkers, though with AD, the loved ones are usually the ones driven crazy :( Anyway, glad the old lady lived it up once in a while with her advocaat!

“Dr. Frank believed that one cause of inadequate concentrations of RNA and nucleotides for repair and production of energy is an age-related increase in enzymes that destroy nucleic acids (i.e., nucleases—specifically, ribonuclease, which breaks down RNA). As people grow older, ribonuclease enzyme activity has been reported to increase. Consequently, just as the requirement to repair damaged cells increases, the substances required for this repair (nucleic acids) are being degraded by higher concentrations of destructive enzymes. Consequently, Dr. Frank believed older people have an even higher requirement for nucleic acids than younger people. Thus, the older we get, the greater our need for nucleic acids, both for replacement and for repair.”

Doesn’t anything with cells in it, and hence nuclei have nucleic acid in it? What is the distinction here? Protein and fish oil … the oily fish oil like Cod liver oil. That is supposed to be good for you. Something they used to give sick kids didn’t they as a home remedy?

Cod liver oil has been used to prevent and treat rickets (vitamin D deficiency in childhood) in the previous century, before we be able to synthesize vitamin D. Just like other fish oil it contain industrial pollutants. It has also lots of preformed vitamin A, which can prevent a deficiency but also cause toxicity of excess, something that beta-carotene cannot do.
In other words, just eat your carrots and take your vitamin D if you can’t get enough sunshine during the day.

Most people assume that getting one’s vitamin A requirements met is easy because the body converts beta-carotene into vitamin A as needed. This is not true for many people. Some of the beta-carotene that we consume in foods converts into vitamin A (retinol) in the body. If there is not enough vitamin A available for use in the body, some healthy people’s bodies convert betacarotene into vitamin A to make up the difference. Increased conversion is stimulated when the body’s vitamin A supply drops below a threshold amount. However, for many other people, the body’s conversion of beta-carotene to vitamin A is not efficient enough to produce adequate vitamin A blood levels. E.g. “: Lin’s study of 11 healthy well-fed women living in a controlled environment found that 5 out of 11 of them (45%) did not experience measurable increases in their blood vitamin A after consuming beta-carotene. The authors said, “The vitamin A activity of ß-carotene is variable and surprisingly low in women. The reasons for this are not well understood. The vitamin A activity of ß-carotene in men is still uncertain.”” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11976165

That’s one of the reasons why a 100% plantbaed diet won’t work with everybody. Your body has a storage for Vitamin A (at the liver) which usually last for months or up to a year. It’s only afterwards that you will take notice of a defeciency in your conversion rate of plant based beta carotin into Vitamin A:

Actually, Dr Greger had already responded to this kind of arguments here.

That was over ten years ago. According to a review published last year, “Methods to assess the bioavailability and bioconversion of provitamin A carotenoids have advanced significantly in the past 10 y….” Though the conversion is not as efficient as we used to think, there is no need to consume preformed vitamin A according to the Institute of Medicine. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to beta-carotene containing foods! That’s one of the reasons I recommend we eat dark green leafy vegetables every day.

The links are in the original comments. I noticed that you use the same 10 years old study. Personally I won’t take the article from Super Nutrition seriously as they are a company selling supplement and prone to use reductionist research to further their agenda. If you listen to them at the end of the day, you will buy supplements by the truckload.. It’s advantageous to them to assume that the conversion rate is problematic based on old study, in order to sell more supplements..

Although scientists scoffed when Frank published his book in 1976, subsequent
research indicates that nucleotides such as RNA may help to reverse the
effects of aging.

“I have a patient in her 80s who’s
been taking Dr. Frank’s RNA formula for nearly 35 years,” says Carmen
Fusco, a clinical nutritionist in New York who worked with Frank. “This
woman looks and feels decades younger than she is.” “

As one who was born in the fifties, we were surrounded by lead based
paints and were given inoculations of every imaginable formula, via the
public school system and a well meaning public health structure. Later
in life, we had mercury directly placed into our teeth to insure a
lifetime of absorption while consuming a consortium of preservative
infused, growth hormone permeated meats and vegetables grown from
synthetic, petroleum-based fertilizers. Being raised on a farm, I grew
up surrounded by (and handling) herbicides, pesticides and petro-based
fertilizers, even to the point of flag marking agricultural aircraft as
they flew overhead, drenching farm boys with varied concoctions.
During tilling season, we spent hours-on-end operating machinery (not
the kind with air conditioned cabins) that billowed engine exhaust fumes
a few feet from our faces. Now. largely an organic vegan, I must wonder
if I have saved myself from at least some of the obvious damaging
environmental elements encountered along the pathway of a very good life. In all
fairness, man’s ability to produce ample food and fiber resulting from
well-intended petroleum and chemical engineering created a boon for
planet Earth’s inhabitants; however, we now know that this has come with
a cost. I have heard of many approaches to vitamin C and herbal
detoxification mantras, but am made confused and skeptical by the wide variety of
opinions. I am curious to learn more before my cognitive decline reaches a hopeless point of no return. According to my wife, it already has.

Ha Ha … Thanks for the vote of confidence and kind words Bruce. In reality, English is my second language. Cajun French was spoken here in southern Louisiana when I was a child surrounded by my Cajun culture. Still working on English at 61 years of age. But seriously, my post does reveal some real concerns regarding the early years in an agricultural setting, during the post war time when our culture was still learning the finer “science” of food production, preservation / processing, transportation and packaging for market. These are results of necessary wartime research, much of which has elevated humankind while other elements are now being revealed to be a Trojan horse of health concerns. In only two generations, we went from eighty percent of the population producing fresh food for the table to only approximately three percent producing food for the rest of the population, making modern food handling, both a blessing and a necessary evil of sorts. I have faith that the wisdom of mankind will prevail. Thank goodness for Dr. Greger and those who engage in such prudent research. Who knows where we’re headed. health-wise ??

I just had a friend diagnosed with frontotemporal lobe dementia, and am wondering if there has been any research tracking the prevalence of this disease in various populations. Is it worse in the US where the SAD may contribute? Is it unrelate to what we’ve learned about Alzheimers and diet? Is this disease increasing in our population? Would appreciate your doing something on this topic please.

I need help I am not getting good resultsI have been high carb low fat or essentially The Kempner rice and fruit diet, It appears 36% of ppl did not seem to improve on the diet based on the note below. One reason may be the spillover effect described in Dr Greger’s video. http://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-spillover-effect-links-obesity-to-diabetes/ If you are obese, you drip fatty acids into your blood stream, in a high sugar high insulin environment, this leads to development of ceramide. Ceramides and plaque not from eating fat but from dripping fat. Do you think for those 36% of the population, a plant based atkins diet is advisable until they lose enough weight to stop dripping fat into their blood. The reason I write this is because my blood sugar has been getting worse and the difference in upper and lower number of my blood pressure is getting larger indicating that my arteries are getting less flexible and are plaquing up more. I will start a plant based atkins diet today and let you know how that works. Believe me I rather stay on a high carb fruit and starch diet, but I am scared what is happening to my body.

“In Kempner’s original cohort of 192 people, 25 patients died. Of the remaining 167, 60 patients did not substantially improve their blood pressure values. However, 107 patients showed significant improvement (from 200/112 mmHg to 149/96 mmHg) with the diet. Heart size decreased in 66 of 72 patients. Serum cholesterol was reduced in 73 of 82 patients. Retinopathy was reduced or disappeared completely in 21 of 33 patients. We must keep these results in context with the times, during which the life expectancy of anyone with malignant hypertension was 6 months.”[

Billy why are you doing Kempner’s diet? Why not WFPB? Correct me if I am wrong but Dr Greger mentions Kempner’s diet to demonstrate that it was shown diet can change health as compared to other interventions.

If you are looking for diet advice and can’t wait for Dr Gregers book On How Not to Die there are many options out there. Dr Barnard has a specific book on diabetes. I really like Dr Furhman’s Eat For Health.

Veganrunner Thanks for your response. I am not on Kempner Rice diet, but like it, It is basically a high carb low fat diet, Lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, etc. I was pointing out that in the Kempner Rice diet, that a HCLF diet did not work for about 36% of those who tried the diet, The spillover effect may explain why. if you are eating HCLF but effectively dripping butter from your fat cells, then you are not getting the benefit of going Low fat,

Billy are you overweight? You should read Furhman’s book. He goes into detail about the importance of getting to a healthy weight and the improvement in your numbers that follow. He is all about greens and the nutrient density of a food. Maybe I am missing your point but I don’t know who advocates a high fat diet for cardiovascular health. Even if that fat is from plants.

yes I weigh 350 lbs, so if you watched Dr Gregers video on fat spillover then you would understand why I am concerned about being on a high carb low fat diet. If you consume/leak saturated (palmitic acid) fat in a high insulin high sugar environment then you tend to form hard waxy fat ceramides in the muscles cells which increase your insulin resistance. I have watched Dr Furhmans video and seen him on FAT sick and nearly dead, I understand what he is saying. I have followed what he said basically for months, and have lost some weight before, but my blood sugar levels keep rising. I was barely prediabetic before when I was atkins Morning blood sugar between 100 and 108 after being on the vegan hclf diet off and on mainly on, for the last 21 months, my blood sugar is now between 124 to 130. The blood pressure runs around 75/135 on small dose of blood pressure medicine, the difference is 60, 30 to 40 is a sign of flexible arteries, My pulse pressure before I started eating primarily vegan was closer to 50. If you watched Dr Gregers video on plant based atkins, you see that Harvard says it is a very good diet. So I have started it, I eat spinach/ broccoli, raspberries, chia seeds, 2 oz almonds, 1 brazil nut, and either 6T of Hempseed or 2 cups of beans. It is not an exciting diet, I just want results. However after day 1, my blood sugar is higher and my pulse pressure is the slightly higher, more stiffness, but my ankles are looking thinner. I will give it 5 days and then re evaluate.

Billy are you close to the library? Go read the book. You have already committed to a WFPB diet. That is the hardest point. Now you just need to lose some weight. Your numbers will improve.

I will tell you a very quick story. I was at a Christmas party and I am looking at this young woman across the room. She had the most beautiful smile. She sees me and comes up and I realize it was someone I knew very well. She had lost 150 pounds! When I asked her how she did it she said she is following Dr Furhman’s advise! Eat to Live. Why I like his books is because he gives you the tools to follow and short stories along the way to keep you motivated. He is all about salads. Huge salads!

lol Veganrunner I have been basically following Dr Fuhrmans diet of fruits vegetable beans and brown rice and lots of spinach and broccoli, the diet does not work for me. Based on the results of the HCLF- Kempner Rice diet, 35% of the ppl who followed the hclf diet did not get benefits, for the other 65% of the ppl it works great. I am trying to stick to whole food plant based diet, but I will now try a high fat low carb diet – plant based atkins, I already know that the HCLF – fruitarian, raw til 4, starch solution, fuhrman diet, neal barnard diet, does not work for me. Obviously, one diet does not fit all. I like being vegan, I just do not want to keep spinning my wheels, and continuing becoming more diabetic from a HCLF diet. Once I am thin, I will try again to eat hclf, if it still does not work then I will stick to a plant based atkins diet with an occasional fruit carbo load every few days to keep my metabolism up.

A small group of us who are pre-diabetic have been eating a plant based and lower carb/high fat (nuts, seeds, avocado) diet for the past year with good results. http://jacknorrisrd.com/pre-type-2-diabetes-and-lean-vegans/ In our case, we are all lean and insulin sensitive, but produce too little insulin to keep our blood glucose out of the danger zone. High carb diets are a disaster for us, and even carbs in low to moderate amounts need to be carefully chosen. Often fruits are problematic and can be replaced with non-starchy vegetables. For someone who is overweight and pre-diabetic or has type 2 diabetes, insulin resistance is usually the major factor. However, over time beta cells can burn out, leading to insulin depletion and less tolerance for carbs. I hope the low carb/high fat diet works out for you like it has for us.

Thanks Russell and Suepy, I was beginning to think I was only one who had not had success controling blood sugar, on a high carb low fat diet. I was trying to point out to Vegan runner that there was about 35% of kempners patient that his diet did not work for. My results so far: I have already noticed a drop in 3 days of being on a high fat low carb plant based diet, my fasting blood sugar is down from 130’s to near 100. Lost 5 lbs and My blood pressure is now 120/70 down from 140/75 with the pulse pressure only 50 instead of 60 to 70. I eat some berries, and 5 prunes in the morning, and then workout, and the rest of day is chia seeds, almonds, hempseed, flaxseed, broccoli or spinach, and sometimes some peanut butter. I watched a show the other night, the end of the Neanderthals, but it is believed that a portion of modern individuals (predominately european) have neanderthal genetics that affect their ability to gain and utilize fat more efficiently to stay alive in cold weather and starvation times. This may explain why the 35% of the people do well on a high fat low carb diet and why the rest do better on high carb low fat. Again thanks for letting me know that there are ppl doing and thriving on a plant based atkins diet.

Bernstein says that the metabolism of fat is utterly dependent on how much carbo you’re getting. Unfortunately, he includes animal fats in his prescribed diet. David Jenkins, pioneer of the Eco-Atkins diet, saw the people in his study lose weight using a vegan diet of 26% carb, 31% protein, and 43% fat. Jenkins used vegetable oils in his study, which I don’t add to my diet because they are low in nutrients compared to nuts, seeds, and avocados, and Jenkins’ protein intakes were higher than I use. It just takes trial and error for you to see what fits your profile – keep testing glucose and stay active. You’re not alone in this; there seem to be a number of us who can’t handle too many carbs, regardless of how healthy the carbs are.

Thanks Suepy, like you, I do not eat processed oil, keep my protein grams to about 75g and also avoid nightshade vegetables, I have a hypothesis that refilling the liver with carbs keeps your metabolism high, since I need to lose weight, I am going to eat about 300 calories of fruit in the morning to fill the liver up and then exercise and eat only HFLC. Occasionally I will do carbo load days when I eat 800 calories of fruit for breakfast, and 4 cups of beans for lunch and then greens for dinner. Can you eat beans or do they raise your sugar levels?

I can eat a half cup of beans in a meal, more with soybeans, but I try to keep the carbs in each meal under 25 net grams and eat more frequent small meals. My calorie needs are modest since I’m petite, about 1600-1800 calories daily depending on activity, and protein intake is about 100 grams. If all that fruit is causing your blood glucose to spike, I’d say put aside that hypothesis and opt for slower digested carbs.

Thanks for your response. I was wondering about beans. I am awake at 300 in the morning, do not know if it is related to lower levels of seratonin from reduced carbs. I have also noticed my eyes have also been drier the last few days. My eating 300 calories of fruit is nothing, I use to consume like 2000 to 3000 calories in fruit a day. I weigh 345 so I am not petite. Almost a month ago, I started a new HCLF diet, the first 9 days I was on an all fruit and greens diet eating about 2500 calories, I lost 18 lbs – 2lbs/day. Then plateaued for the next 17 days til I started eating this HFLC diet. Between the two diets, I prefer eating unlimited carbs, but my body does not respond well. it is not horrible, the highest fasting blood sugar I measured was 140.

I really admire your self discipline at eating a HFLC plant based diet, there definitely does not seem to have any thrills to it. At least with an regular atkins diet, you could eat steak, chicken wings and cheese. Back in 2001, i lost 95 lbs just by eliminating grains, potatoes, sugar and caffeine. I ate everything else and exercised alot. Now after watching Dr. Gregers videos, I am paranoid and feel guilty if I even think of eating animal products.

Eating used to be the highlight of my day, now it is not dying from a heart attack or stroke or cancer or diabetes, etc. :)

I understand that diets low in saturated fat and cholesterol are less effective in obese people because their metabolic and endocrine systems are damaged. You may find some of the articles below useful;

“Despite predictions from epidemiologic and physiologic studies, recent prospective trials have demonstrated equivalent weight loss on high-fat versus low-fat diets. Nevertheless, the type of dietary fat consumed has substantially different effects on lipoproteins. Saturated fat raises high-density lipoprotein cholesterol but has unfavorable effects on total cholesterol, and has been associated with increased cardiovascular events. In contrast, unsaturated fats, and particularly omega-3 fatty acids, have the combined benefits of lowering serum cholesterol and raising high-density lipoprotein, as well as favorable effects on insulin resistance and inflammation; they also lower cardiovascular events in high-risk patients.http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11883-005-0057-6#page-1

“Multiple mechanisms likely contribute to the altered plasma lipid responses to dietary changes in individuals with excess adiposity. The greater rate of hepatic cholesterol synthesis in obese individuals suppresses the expression of hepatic LDL receptors (LDLR), thereby reducing hepatic LDL uptake. Insulin resistance develops as a result of adipose-tissue induced inflammation, causing significant changes in enzymes necessary for normal lipid metabolism. In addition, the LDLR-mediated uptake in obesity is attenuated by alterations in neuroendocrine regulation of hormonal secretions (e.g. growth hormone, thyroid hormone, and cortisol) as well as the unique gut microbiota, the latter of which appears to affect lipid absorption. Reducing adipose tissue mass, especially from the abdominal region, is an effective strategy to improve the lipid response to dietary interventions by reducing inflammation, enhancing insulin sensitivity, and improving LDLR binding. Thus, normalizing adipose tissue mass is an important goal for maximizing the diet response to a plasma cholesterol–lowering diet.”http://advances.nutrition.org/content/2/3/261.full

As for how to lose weight, that’s the $64,000 question. The US National Weight Control Registry reports that successful long term weight loss is associated with “high levels of physical activity (≈1 h/d), eating a low-calorie, low-fat diet, eating breakfast regularly, self-monitoring weight, and maintaining a consistent eating pattern across weekdays and weekends.”http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/82/1/222S.long

You may also find these studies interesting

“Under isocaloric conditions, VLCHF and HCLF diets result in similar weight loss. Overall, although both diets had similar improvements for a number of metabolic risk markers, an HCLF diet had more favorable effects on the blood lipid profile. This suggests that the potential long-term effects of the VLCHF diet for CVD risk remain a concern and that blood lipid levels should be monitored.” (Long-term health effects of high and low carbohydrate, weight loss diets in obese subjects with the metabolic syndrome; http://www.anzctr.org.au; ACTR No. 12606000203550).http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0735109707032597

I’m going to chime in to support Suepy’s comment. I’m pre diabetic as well, and the low-carb, high plant fat diet has allowed me to get my A1c down to 5.2, basically normal range. But it requires being strict with oneself — a single 5.5 ounce soy yogurt can still shoot my glucose to 150 all by itself. A bowl of oatmeal is even worse, like 175. But nuts, seeds, soy products (w/o sugars), and salads, non-carby veggies, am never over 140 and usually under 115, and fasting is generally 85-95.

1) “We don’t die from old age” >>You appear to not have updated your understanding of the body’s biology with stem cells being the foundation of life. These stem cells have a limited reproductive potential (just like ovaries) hence we die. Old age is characterized by an exhaustion of the reproductive lifetime of the stem cells that produce every cell in our bodies. By that understanding, we do die from old age, and the direct consequences of the vulnerabilities tied to that depletion of stem cell reproductive potential. Apparent clinical health is neither a sufficient indicator of inner body health (i.e. subclinical inflammation) nor of the depletion status of cells.

2) The same man who brought stem cell understanding to the scientific arena, André Gernez, has had a life-long interest for the biology of cell and the development of degenerative disease. Regarding Alzheimer’s disease specifically, he postulated a theory on the biology of religious faith tied to Alzheimer disease. According to him, humans have a biologically programmed function that allows for non-rational thinking. Like for everything we learn, walking, speech, there is a right timing to train our non-rational thinking, what he defined as the religious function, biologically located in the pro-frontal cortex.
Around age 6 is the window of opportunity. He correlated the Alzheimer’s statistics with the onset of secularism in France, where Jules Ferry removed all religious education, which historically happened between age 6 and 12 in all primary schools in France.
Knowing is body of work, the studies you are publishing come with little surprise to me. I wish more of the non-physical non-dietary factors were taken into account in epidemiological studies. Also, I wish you and your team and readers spent more time in histology or the history of medicine, rather than in recent publications you would save about 50 years of time, perhaps more depending who you read. That is the source of what is much later (if ever) confirmed by double-blind placebo controlled studies.

We are constantly living in the stone-age of tomorrow. And we always do have in the present the beyond-doubt truth about what will be mainstream in 50 or 100 years, it’s just a matter of looking for it and finding it.

I think this is just a feeling you have. Sure, it can structure your thinking to the point where you are beyond doubt about your understanding of the golden part of the past, but you can easily get beyond doubt for bad and subjective reasons and the way you speak so universally here suggests intellectual arrogance.

Have you made a competent effort to probe Gernez’ correlation? What covariates were controlled for that enables such a fine-grained claim that religiosity during youth is the key mechanism? I don’t exactly see the height of statistical modeling in the source you cited.

I am not going to answer your answer with what you want, numbers and statistical correlations, if you allow me I will try to take you deeper than that.

I take much more seriously his work on cancer. He is at the origin of the stem cell concept and theory. His protocol of proactive prevention based on simple things: 1) caloric reduction 2) supplementation 3) chemo-prevention, all done orderly following a simple protocol.
His work on understanding and easily preventing autism. It is an excess of womb testosterone, damp down with progesterone cream to avoid permanently fixative effect of later spikes of testosterone.

He work on a dozen of subjects, deeply changing the understanding, usually chasing away a dogma, and unifying a lot of accumulated observations that don’t make sense but all fit in a simple and coherent paradigm. He also infer what known function do and how how they will react to different things.

That approach, is the best statistical approach I can think of at a theoretical level. Theory to me does not mean the opposite of “in practice”. Quite the opposite. It means “a formal system of understanding that is is inferred base on – and can infer practice”.
You would be surprised how much very meaningful work humanity, even animals are able to do and understand without ever sitting at a statistical class. We didn’t wait for statistical analysis to understand what food to eat and what foods kill people. It’s very important to detach a bit from that scientific obsession we have sometimes, in able to actually do far better science. Otherwise we calculate correlations between meaningless things in a meaningless PhD subject.

His work on the biology of faith dates back to the 80/90s, it’s only more recently that he tied it to Alzheimer. So these are two different bodies of work.
All the work that he has done so far, has been confirmed later by all the strictest scientific investigation methods you can think of. That should come with little surprise when you know he infers his theories based on unifying experimental work and epidemiological data.
This is not a source to a Nature article with all rigorous scientific correlations…I know!

He’s of the old school and published all his work in books, and mainly sent it to the competent authorities for them to turn that into public policy and update their understanding. He (mistakenly) had that belief that justice would be done to his work promptly by doing so. He was not one to publish in science reviews. And he’s outstanding if you read his work and his story. The people who worked with him, and myself, are working to make his work more available to the public since the public avenues did not. So there are documents, there are scientific writings but it’s in the very process of being made more available publicly as I write.

The TB treatment during war went mainstream after trying on a few dozens of people, no double controlled placebo controlled trials, and here we are today with TB handled in all countries with good practice when it used to be a leading cause of death. We are in over-scientific over-skeptical times today, unable to tell the nonsensical correlations and speculations on irrelevant subjects from what it evident on the most vital ones.

So concluding, on this body of work linking Alzheimer to the biology of faith, read “Les Maladies Dégénératives – Les propositions du Dr André Gernez” it has a chapter documenting his work on this link I am talking about. That part of his body of works, as far I understand it is a hypothesis that he poses that makes sense to him. Unlike other work he did, it has not been has heavily confirmed by further studies yet, because more recent hypothesis. Historically it has taken 10~30 years for his work to start to be confirmed, sadly never mentioning him, and rarely taking action on the results found, like putting together a public policy of prevention.

Also, it’s very important. When people share with you scientific claims. There are really two approaches you can have: 1) I need a strong case to believe that and I will not believe anything that doesn’t deliver me a strong case OR 2) This sounds very interesting, how can I to see if that is true or not and perhaps put to a challenge myself.
It may sound the same, but I notice as scientist that most people with a scientific penchant are total skeptics, they expect everything to be delivered on a gold platter for their majesty to be convinced beyond doubt. That is not how science work. If you hear something interesting, and it has a relevance to you, it’s your job as a scientist to take that onboard with you and put it to the test. The studies you rely your belief system on did not wait for a strong case, they put it to the test. It would be good to have more “testers” in that sense than critics and skeptics, to move things forward.

It may sound the same, but I notice as scientist that most people with a
scientific penchant are total skeptics, they expect everything to be
delivered on a gold platter for their majesty to be convinced beyond
doubt.

If you’ve been convinced beyond doubt, it is easy to assume that you have had more contact with the relevant information than me. There is a burden of proof that is upon you when you present a claim. It is easy to construct claims that would be relevant if true but are false, and we deal with an abundance of claims from minority positions that would be relevant if true. It is practically impossible to verify them all unless the people in command of true claims can bear a substantial burden of proof.

I don’t expect you to know everything about a topic but I do expect command of a plurality of references on this kind of complex topic, if you are coming from a position of authority and saying “this is so”. In this case it means that you may have to actually crack open Gernez’ book chapter and show me some of the important bits of evidence from other researchers that he used. I want some reason to trust that you have tread on stable ground and that I can tread on it too and do more extensive ‘testing’ toward a practically relevant goal.

You list a number of things that Gernez studied and claim that subsequent science bore out his views in all cases. That’s a much bigger claim than the hypothesis I thought we were considering, and Gernez’ views on the effects of secular reform in France and the importance of spirituality in youth for preventing AD can still easily be false or biased even if he was reliable in all other cases. I bring up his correlation in part because you brought it up and attracted attention to it. I talk about statistical modeling in part because its easy to read across a language barrier, but also because it is an important means for control. Many correlations are spurious, and comparing a hypothesis with a range of alternative explanations is really at the heart of science, whether that science is conveyed in statistics or in prose.

This “old school” statistical method whereby a single author accumulates observations that fit into a coherent paradigm is quite fallible, simply because it is often hard to tell whether or not the cart is being placed before the horse. Confirmation bias can easily exclude data that do not fit and gloss over some of the heterogeneity in phenomena (‘spirituality’ being one such phenomenon), and on most topics I start from a position of ignorance about the real extent of working expertise. This is why I am reluctant to endorse the views of a single reviewer without seeing that other researchers share many of the same views in general.

In this case I can agree that there is some evidence that religious participation later in life is frequently helpful in limiting AD, but the exact mechanisms seem uncertain and it’s not clear that exercise of any particular ‘non-rational’ part of the brain is especially important. Maybe blood flow and brain activity in certain parts of the brain are important for preventing clinical AD, but if this is so then this could also be in putatively ‘rational’ parts related to memory and social function; and for example it does seem to me that religious affiliation makes it easier for an older frail person to remain in contact with a community.

Dr. Greger; At 67 I have been diagnosed with Minor Cognitive Impairment. You refer to Alzheimer’s disease and the fact that Saffron performed as well as a prescription. I can find no capsules with more than 1% Saffron.
What percentage of Saffron was included in the Saffron capsules employed in the study? Do you have the commercial name of any capsules that include this level of Saffron?Thank you Jim

The article “Reduction of Abeta amyloid pathology in APPPS1 transgenic mice in the absence of gut microbiota” (http://www.nature.com/articles/srep41802) links gut flora to Alzheimer’s. But, it does not describe the diet used for the mice. Can we find out what the healthy mice ate? Thanks, Jeff

Hi, Jeff Rulifson. I am Christine, a NF volunteer moderator. The article states that the two groups were fed the same food. The difference was that one group had intestinal microflora, and the other did not. I hope that helps!